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The case of Pete Rose remains an enduring scandal 25 years after the Cincinnati Reds player and manager agreed to a lifetime ban from Major League Baseball on August 23, 1989. In 2014, the conversation about him often harkens back to images of Rose’s grit and on-field excellence during the 1970s. Rose, now 73, seemingly remains hopeful of being reinstated into the sport, despite a life in “exile” that was recently explored by Tyler Kepner in the New York Times. Many pundits support him in that hope.

But MLB commissioner Bud Selig’s review of Rose’s application for readmission to the game has remained under review at least a decade. Selig is set to retire as commissioner in January 2015 and has given no indication that a re-evaluation of Rose is imminent.

Despite the goodwill towards Rose, his transgression in betting on games remains as serious today as it was in 1989. Which is to say, very serious.

In my classes, with frequent citations to John Dowd’s comprehensive 1989 report investigating the scandal, I explain why the uncertainty of outcome inherent in honestly competitive sport disappears when players and coaches bet on the games they are involved in—even if such wagers are only “to win.” I also read the following excerpt from Michael Sokolove’s textured biography of Rose:

Betting on the game is baseball’s ultimate taboo because it has the potential, as nothing else does, of wrecking the sport … It calls into question the integrity of the competition, our faith that the winner will be determined by the best efforts of each player on the field.

My classroom exchanges on the topic, reflective of the Pete Rose debate that persists today, usually proceed as follows (my students’ typical questions and objections are in bold).

Pete Rose only bet on the Reds to win when he was the team’s manager. He believed in his club. How can that justify lifetime banishment from baseball?

Major League Baseball Rule 21(d) is clear. Here is the relevant portion:

Any player, umpire, or club or league official or employee, who shall bet any sum whatsoever upon any baseball game in connection with which the bettor has a duty to perform shall be declared permanently ineligible.

But rules in baseball are selectively enforced all the time—just look at what happened with the pick-up-the-rug-and-repeatedly-sweep steroid debacle. Pete Rose didn’t throw games like the Chicago White Sox players did in the 1919 World Series. Rose always tried to win when he managed the Cincinnati Reds. What is wrong with that? Look: Footnote #3 of the Dowd Report is clear on this point.

Why does that matter? He may not have been betting on all the games, but he still wanted to win every game.

It matters for two reasons. First, when Rose did not bet on the Reds, his inaction was a signal to his bookies that he wasn’t very confident in that game. Those bookies may have used this inside information to place a bet against the Reds. This doesn’t mean the game was fixed, but is reflective of Rose’s state of mind. He was compromised. Second, his wager on certain games, but not others, may have influenced the way he made decisions as a manager.

What do you mean?

If he had a wager on that night’s game, he could be more inclined to burn through his bullpen in a less-than-optimal way. He may have used pinch hitters and pinch runners differently. In an all-out-effort to win a single wagered-upon game, he could, in turn, be sacrificing the team’s chances in a number of future games. Similarly, in games where he didn’t bet at all, he may rest certain players so they are fresh in the next game, when he was wagering on the Reds.

Let’s just assume he did wager on each and every game. Then what he did is okay, right?

No, it’s still problematic from an integrity standpoint. Even if Rose were to have bet on every game throughout the entire season, he probably didn’t always wager the exact same amount on each game.

So what? The amount he bet shouldn’t matter. He was always betting the Reds to win.

Differing bet amounts are telling. If he bet $100 one game and $1,000 another game, what message is he telling his team? Or his bookie? Or himself? It shows he had fluid levels of confidence in certain games versus others. This distinction is important. For example, according to John Dowd, when certain Reds’ pitchers took the mound, Rose didn’t bet at all.

You can’t tell me what Pete Rose did is any different than the CEO of a big publicly traded company who has stock options and bonuses based on share price or other performance metrics.

I’ll try. The CEO hypothetical is distinguishable. CEO compensation schemes and employment agreements are transparent. They are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Those who are interested can read them. Illegal sports gambling is the complete opposite. Rose didn’t disclose his bets for fans, bookies, or other gamblers to absorb prior to the game’s first pitch. He only told his runner. Read this from Page Two of the Dowd Report:

Gambling is conducted in secret by its participants. Normally little is recorded and what is written down is destroyed shortly after payment of the wager. Payments are often made in cash by runners between the bookmaker and the gambler because cash is fungible and difficult to trace.

All of this was 25 years ago. Isn’t that long enough? Rose has recanted and apologized.

He has, but it took a while. He spent 15 years denying he ever bet on baseball. In an effort to sell his 2004 book, Rose finally admitted that he had. His August 23, 1989 agreement with MLB allowed him to apply for reinstatement after a one-year period.

How could he explain away his baseball gambling in his application for reinstatement?

He would have to come up with something different than some form of the “I only bet on the Reds to win” explanation. For this type of mea culpa to “work,” he would have had to (i) transparently bet on (ii) every Reds game for (iii) exactly the same amount. This did not happen. The first part of the Dowd Report included a powerful paragraph addressing the seriousness of gambling by game participants:

Betting on baseball by a participant of the game is corrupt because it erodes and destroys the integrity of the game of baseball. Betting also exposes the game to the influence of forces who seek to control the game to their own ends. Betting on one's own team gives rise to the ultimate conflict of interest in which the individual player/bettor places his personal financial interest above the interests of the team.

Well, despite all this, Rose should still be in the Hall of Fame for what he did as a player. He is the all-time hit king—no one else will ever get to 4,256. He has to be in the Hall of Fame!

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.